I am not the right color to be called out on my white privilege but I guess I am ripe to be called out in all the ways that matter. Can you appropriate white guilt? Am I, as I have long suspected, doing this wrong?

I do not share the pain of the immigrants' child. My family has been here for so long that we barely talk about where we used to live--I'm pretty sure it's lost to memory. I grew up on The Simpsons, stolen moments of Married with Children, late at night. Star Wars, Ecto Cooler, Domino's pizza, Ray Bradbury, MTV, and TGIF. 90s black comedies and all white sitcoms with laugh tracks and, only in the background, during commercials, the occasional arguments and epithets in Spanish. The Old Country was Herman's Hermits and Nick at Nite.

But I know what it is to be caught between 2 worlds. The shame of looking older relatives in the face and not understanding what they say--or worse, understanding and being unable to respond in that tongue. The frustration of being told that you're a bad Mexican, when you aren't a Mexican at all. Or maybe you are and it just isn't the part that everyone who defined your heritage to you wears on the surface. Being assumed to be part of a culture and having that be the focus of your achievements.

You don't look like everyone else in the gifted and talented program; I hope you're going to college.

They said that to me, the granddaughter of multiple degrees where a Ph. D was the obvious choice, raised in a household of readers, Jeopardy! a competition you couldn't refuse. Because of the color of my skin and the chip on my shoulder, sly, witty retorts are my native tongue but I always answered these questions politely in the lingua franca of How to Get Ahead. Because of where I am from, I learned the language of classism by immersion, well before I learned una palabra del espanol, but as my tio can attest, I never learned how to respond. Hang on a second. Did I spell that right? If I am honest, I hear the phrase spoken the way the line is from Men in Black, or said aloud in Ricky Ricardo's accent.
Forgive me. I digress.

Even here, I confuse pop culture and lessons from history books with a heritage. Even here, I don't know where I fit. I look like a model minority, I guess (this here, this phrase, again with the appropriation). But. I look safe. Safe enough to question. Safe enough to project upon.

Where are you from?

I say, Colorado and am not believed. I say I am American and am met with doubt. I say I was born here and I am met with question after question about my parents, my grandparents. I'm held accountable for relatives I never met, maybe because they want to know if we came here "the right way." Maybe because they like the way my brown features don't look like theirs. Maybe they just think it's cosmopolitan and hip to make chitchat with hourly wage employees who can't walk away from the conversation. It seems to be a way to flaunt their virtues, to congratulate themselves, a victory celebration for the questioners.

I am open-minded; I thought you were Muslim. I thought you were Indian, or Native American, what's the difference, haha. Why won't you smoke a peace pipe with me as a celebration of my assumptions and conversation?

I guess all that time I spent studying math and geography and science and art would have been better served on genealogy. The question of my heritage is writ large in a lifelong pop quiz from skeptical strangers, acquaintences, even friends.

What are you? 

What I am, I guess, is open to interpretation. Often, I am fetishized and rewritten by racists, who have always been drawn to me by my exotic skin and utter lack of accent as I quote movies they love and books they aspire to read. I am inexplicably ethnically generic enough to not pose a threat to their principles and standards.

But I don't think of you as not white.

This phrase becomes a staple of my friendships, even playing a part in the people I date. It is a compliment. The little coconut girl: she's actually white on the inside.

I'm into it; I only date brown girls.
I only date white guys.
I'm sorry, I don't date black men.

These statements shame me to the ground, now. Now that I understand the meanings behind them and the ignorance and the motivation and goddammit, the weight of years and history. Intentional or not, what I used to take as regular valid opinion looks a lot different from this side. Is this what being 'woke' is? Do I want to use that phrase? Again with the appropriation.

I wonder if those boys wanted something they didn't find in my skin, an ideal they thought was buried under the melanin but all they found was a person and it's why it went so poorly. I wonder how the hell I could be so blind to the meaning behind a phrase I heard 'everywhere' those days. How I could use that against a person without seeing it as a weapon? How fucked up was my romantic and interpersonal life that "I'm just not into you romantically" was less acceptable and hurtful than THAT, that garbage, that vitriol, that stupidity.

Maybe this is what I have confused for heritage, more than Monty Python. Maybe it's this shame. I worried once that my genes would keep my kids from having the pretty green eyes their potential father had. I wore blue contact lenses. None of my heroes looked like me. The books I read, fumbling to create a bridge, were things I couldn't relate to, storylines I felt awkward about because I wasn't Hispanic enough. I didn't have an abuela, I had a gammy. I was 29 the first time I ate tamales from a sample cup at the fancy grocery store. I didn't have these essential markers to define me. I couldn't seek them or create them. Because I do not fit. Nevermind that I do not want to fit one mold. Because the lessons I learned about being Hispanic and mixed and unidentifiable were about fighting to not be held back.

About people looking down on you, watching you. About people calling you slurs while you buy cookies because they can't tell "What" you are and that's a threat, apparently. About having to look back and teach yourself about the worries and heartache your heritage is built upon. About separating the blame for these from your own feelings about your culture and building a history of avoiding any action that could push you further under scrutiny for your brownness.

Inevitably, it's about the dichotomy between who you see in the mirror vs how you see yourself through a filter of all the expectations you never asked to be subjected to within your daily. You have to sort through all the layers to get to the truth, underneath. You have to grow to the skies, work within the woke and the layers and the weight. I'll give you some spoilers, though: under all the subtext, the overt missives, it was pretty much just you all along.